When the Past Is Not Another Country: The Battlefields of History in Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia’s 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia’s attempts to promulgate an “empire memory” that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national–meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded–attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades.